Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Update

There have been some changes in the Ebola outbreak in the DRC. It meets the criteria our team set for Tier 1 evacuation. Unless we get the news soon that the suspected cases and deaths were not from Ebola, our team will begin Tier 1 evacuation. We do not believe we are in immediate danger, but given the difficulties of traveling to and from Impfondo, we are being cautious. The children and I will be traveling with the Samoutou family to Brazzaville. Stephen will be staying here to work at the hospital. Please pray for our family and all the others involved.

Elliot Tenpenny at Reigning in Lifegives a good overview of the situation- with a map!

The current situation with Ebola is changing. Just yesterday (current as of sept 10) there have been reports of 10 suspected cases of ebola with 8 deaths in the Bongandanga region of the Democratic Republic of Congo. This is significantly north of the previous outbreak and outside the stated quarantine zone. These 10 cases and 8 deaths are suspected cases at this point and samples have been sent to lab. This is still a distance from our hospital, but significant that if it is confirmed the disease continues to spread. Also there has been one suspected death in Kinshasa, the large city across the river from where we are now.

Please pray for everyone involved on our team as they have some difficult decisions to be made over the next few days. Also please pray for our leadership at Samaritans Purse and World Medical Mission as they decide where and how we are to serve in the future.

See the attached below for more information. The circle in the upper left is the location of our hospital.

The Ebola toll is fast approaching 5,000, with 2,400 people dead in the space of a few months, the World Health Organization said Friday. It’s getting worse and not better. Yet aid is not pouring into West Africa.

It mystifies Sophie Delaunay, executive director of the U.S. office of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF or Doctors Without Borders). “We know what needs to be done but we don’t know why it’s not being done. It’s incomprehensible to us,” she told NBC News.

Dr. Oliver Johnson of the King's Sierra Leone Partnership at Connaught Hospital in Freetown echoes the sentiment. “The international response to the outbreak remains virtually non-existent, in terms of actual impact on the ground,” Johnson wrote in a plea to international infectious disease specialists. “At Connaught … our isolation unit is full with adult and pediatric cases and we have suspected cases in the waiting area and emergency room that we can't isolate — I don't know how much longer the hospital will be able to stay open in these circumstances.”

The No. 1 need? People.

"The number of new patients is moving far faster than the capacity to manage them. We need to surge at least three to four times to catch up with the outbreaks,” WHO director-general Dr. Margaret Chan said Friday. "The right people, the right specialists, and specialists who are appropriately trained and know how to keep themselves safe."

The lion’s share of the work in Liberia, the hardest-hit country, and much of West Africa has been and is being done by missionaries whose groups had been slogging away for decades through civil wars and disasters to try to minister to the people there.